Community:SummerOfCode12:Brainstorming

Mozilla community members - submit proposals here for 2012 Google Summer of Code projects with Mozilla. (If this page looks empty, it's because accepted ideas have already been transferred to the official list.)

Are you a students looking to apply to SoC with Mozilla? First, have a look at the official list of ideas. However, you can also submit your own ideas - you don't have to put an idea on this page and get it made official in order to propose it.

Suggestion List

Proposals can be in almost any part of the Mozilla project - don't be fooled by the "Code" in "Summer of Code". If there is no category for your part of Mozilla, add one!

Mozilla Platform (Gecko)

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Details - with links as appropriate

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Firefox

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Details - with links as appropriate

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Firefox Mobile

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Details - with links as appropriate

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Boot2Gecko

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Details - with links as appropriate

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Calendar

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Details - with links as appropriate

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Thunderbird

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Details - with links as appropriate

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Thunderbird Profile backup/transfer

backup and restore of Thunderbird profiles. Should allow users to transfer profiles between machines. Would need to investigate Mozbackup and figure out how this would be better. Options about which files to backup would be a start.

bienvenu

bienvenu,standard8

Thunderbird Profile discovery/recovery

Handle things like profiles.ini getting corrupted on upgrade (e.g., try to find a profile dir and hook it back up to profiles.ini), and perhaps profile repair, when accounts get corrupted.

bienvenu

bienvenu,standard8

This is probably relatively easy, but diagnosing and repairing some of the trickier corruptions might be complicated.

Improve GMail interoperability

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721316 for more info. The biggest win here is probably avoiding downloading the same message to offline stores multiple times and multiple gloda full-text indexing, by using X-GM-MSGID, X-GM-THRID may help with threading in gloda, cross-folder views, and even within a folder. There are probably other things we can do to improve our gmail integration. For example, we could avoid notifying for multiple new messages just because a message has multiple tags.

Level of Difficulty - medium to hard, depending on how deep we go here.

Use Shane's extension as a starting point, figure out how to integrate it into Thunderbird. This feature allows the navigation through email attachments. Presented in a additional tab, it offers previews of supported email attachments. It allows full view of the attachment by launching the appropriate registered application or can switch to the email in the email view. Filters allow to the display of attachments of a given type, individual or all folders view. Initially, pictures, PDFs, HTML docs, YouTube/DailyMotion videos should be supported. Other attachments types could be added in core or via plugin.

f you want to email other than gmail on Android, you have to go through the pain of setting the stock email client with IMAP/POP3 settings, ports, user names, passwords, and other reply & compose settings. This feature would allow you to automatically set your Android device email application with the right parameters. It could take the form of an Android thunderbird application, or some other more direct parameter settings via device policy infrastructure

Technical investigation to be done

jb

jb?

Offer url preview within Thunderbird

Many emails contain links to a single web page. The default TB behaviour is to launch the stock browser to view them. This feature allows direct preview in a Thunderbird tab through ctl-click, or direct inline preview for known content (ex: Youtube...).

One way to move the compose window into a tab is to load the compose window document into a XUL iframe (which is like an HTML iframe, except it hosts XUL). To test this out, install the Developer Assistant extension for Thunderbird, then go to Tools -> Extension Developer -> JavaScript Shell and run the following code:

Then try playing around with it, sending a message, etc. As you can see, the basic concept works, but there are currently issues with the UI. Your job will be to sort them out, make everything work properly, and ship your code as part of Thunderbird.

Level of difficulty: hard. Will require writing XUL (menus will probably need to be moved out into an overlay), JavaScript (passing menu commands down to the child iframe) and CSS (to fix theming issues) and writing unit tests to ensure that things work as expected. Since Mac OS X has a global menu, getting it right might require more work. You will need access to a Mac for your proposal to be accepted..